Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  Suddenly my bedroom fractured, and I was everywhere, tumbling in a confetti of memory impressions. I struggled to protect my core being, clinging to a fragment of stable sanity.

  Something bright and implacable twisted through it all like a parasitic spaghetti string worm, and I knew that was the source, the virus or whatever it was the woman had set loose in my upload.

  It pulsed silver then red, redder, reddest. Then . . . was gone.

  I sensed an eye withdrawing from the retinal scanner in my office, but all I could do was luxuriate in the sudden quiet and peaceful drift. The door opened. I stirred myself, came forward, saw Kari Tolerico pulling my office door shut.

  *

  Bogart. Casablanca / Have and Have Not era, screw the color saturation.

  “Thanks for figuring out my message,” I said. “Eventually.”

  Molly wiped her eyes, which had changed from brown to tentative blue with her tears. I hated that phony Mood Wash crap, but didn’t say anything.

  “Do you have to be like that?” she said.

  Passersby gave us looks. Me looks. Hardly anybody went B/W nowadays. We were sitting on a bench in Myrtle Edwards park, facing Elliot Bay.

  “Who do you prefer?” I asked.

  “Just be yourself.”

  “I could saturate Bogie.”

  “Please, Daniel.”

  I went away, then came forward as Daniel Frye. I guess it was the wrong one, though, because she frowned and looked away.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “You never looked like that,” she said, watching a white gull ride over the breakwater.

  “Yes, I did. You just don’t remember. I looked like this when we first met. Come on.”

  “Daniel.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  I dissolved into fairy dust once more. When I came forward again, the bench next to Molly glittered in the noon sun like mica.

  “Satisfied?” I said.

  She smiled sadly. “I’m trying to be.”

  “Do I detect a subtext?”

  I stood before her, the version of Daniel Frye she had last known, an exemplar of male pattern baldness and the moderately inflated spare tire. The faintly ridiculous man she had shoved in drunken anger one night, then screamed and screamed as I fell from her forever and she tried to draw me back. Slipping away with the dread acceleration of gravity, I’d seen her pale arms thrust out after me.

  “Daniel, this is the last time for us. This is goodbye for good. It has to be.”

  “Why? Because your damn girlfriend says so?”

  “No. Because I say so. Jesus, Daniel, when you were around you were never around. Now when you’re not real, you’re always popping up in my ear, or on my computer, or as one of these creepy projections.”

  “I’m real,” I said.

  A thirty-foot yacht motored into the chop beyond the breakwater. A man and a woman in bulky white sweaters stood in the open cockpit, arms around each other’s backs, the man steering one-handed. Dashing.

  I turned to Molly.

  “You really said that stuff to her, didn’t you. About how you couldn’t stand me haunting around your life.”

  She stared at me, her eyes going deep blue at last.

  “Quit that,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Daniel. Kari took it to heart. I was upset and vulnerable.”

  “But you meant it.”

  “I should have told you and gotten it over with. But I couldn’t hurt you again. Kari is protective of me. We’re intimate, a concept you never understood.”

  “I guess I don’t have to hear the gory details.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “I have to go now,” Molly said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yes.”

  It was a deep blue goodbye, and I watched her walk across the park. Kari Tolerico was waiting for her in the parking lot. They got into a solar pod and rolled off. A jogger ran through me. I scattered, and stayed that way.

  Bean There

  I fell flat on my ass, stunned, jaw unhinged, gaping at the thing. Implications piled up fast. My gaze wandered briefly off the marble block, then I fell again. Inside, this time, as my interior order shifted—irrevocably, perhaps. It was a light bulb moment, and cravenly I wished I could pull a chain and turn it off. Thanks a lot, Aimee. Happy Anniversary. I sat on the floor and it sat on the wheeled mover’s cart, note still taped to the side facing me, a sheet of printer paper with red Sharpie lettering three inches high: THIS IS YOURS, BURT. MY MIGHTY MAN!

  *

  Go back two months. Pick a Tuesday in May. A nice spring morning. There might have been birds twittering happily, the way they do. I had the front door of Bean There propped open, plus all the windows on the sidewalk side. Seven a.m. of a twittering fine morning.

  Aimee said, “Wow!”

  “Wow what?” Slanting sunlight had discovered beaches of dust on the round table tops, and I was wiping them down ahead of the Clamoring Horde.

  “A kid in Ashland levitated his bike,” Aimee said. “Can you believe it?”

  “No.”

  “Grouch.”

  “I’m always grouchy before coffee.”

  She snorted—but charmingly, not like a warthog or anything. “By my count you’ve already had a cappuccino and two Americanos. You ought to save some for the paying customers.”

  It was my turn to snort. “Paying customers? Are you trying to be funny? Besides, I meant before I sell any coffee.”

  She hmmm-ed, her attention riveted back on the laptop. She hunched over it, elbows planted on the counter, fingers pronged in her pixie hair, the pert little behind that had launched a thousand or so of my ships aimed in my direction on the black vinyl swivel stool.

  “Come on,” I said. “Nobody’s levitated anything. Not even in Assland.”

  “Ass-land?” She smirked over her shoulder.

  “Ashland. Ashland. What are you reading, anyway. The Weekly World News?”

  “Reuters.”

  At which moment The Clamoring Horde entered Bean There. He was wearing a blue, button-down shirt, crisp khakis, and brown loafers, accessorized with a briefcase and gold earring.

  “Double-tall-two-percent,” he said.

  Aimee got behind the bar and pulled it. I took her place on the stool and scrolled through the Reuters story. In front of witnesses adorable Samuel Welch, aged nine, had purportedly swept his BMX bike into the high altitudes of a neighbor’s poplar. Never mind that one of the witnesses was an off-duty state patrol officer, six months ago this story would have been relegated to the pseudo-news. But with the Harbingers among us anything, any damned thing at all, had seemed to become possible if not explicable.

  Aimee kept glancing in my direction, so I tried not to look too interested in the story.

  “It’s happening,” she said, sing-songy on her way to the freshly de-beached table where the C.H. had seated himself.

  “Don’t get crazy on me,” I sing-songed back. I’d had crazy in my life, plenty of it. An alcoholic father and a bipolar sister. Dad had been a maintenance drinker, and not a mean one. But even a happy drunk is still a drunk, and if you live with one, especially if he’s your parent, you’d better gird yourself for two levels of life. The level that occurs on the surface and that everyone sees, which is the presentation level. And the private level that occurs mostly behind closed doors and makes you feel like the world is a wobbly and uncertain place. I was fourteen when a stroke killed my Mom, and Dad tumbled over the line into a realm of sodden self-pity and violent outbursts. At this point toss in the bipolar sister, the older sister who up till then had been your rock of stability, and see where that gets you. Lori began to see the world in a very different way, and was vocal about it, veering toward the occult and a perspective two shades to the left of sane.

  Yeah, I knew crazy.

  Guys like me grow up obsessed with “normalcy” and order. Or we grow up to be
little chaos mavens ourselves. As a kid I watched TV obsessively. It was my escape hatch. I liked Disney, especially the old black and white footage they sometimes showed of the early days. That was a world in order, and Uncle Walt was like a cool Mr. Rogers. To me he was, anyway. When I grew up I found another safe obsession in my java joint, Bean There. Later, for balance, I found Aimee (though emotionally she wasn’t as safe as a coffee bar). Then the Harbingers arrived.

  “You call it crazy,” Aimee said. “I call it Evolution.”

  With a capital E. The famous news clip seen around the world. The aliens arrived neither as an invading force nor as beneficent galactic pals. By their own description they were “Harbingers.”

  Famous network interviewer: “Harbingers of what?”

  Alien: “Evolution.”

  Speaking of trees, the aliens somewhat resembled gnarled and rootless specimens. Those viewers who had devoted their attention to the minute analysis of The Clip liked to assert that after uttering the word “Evolution” the alien had smiled an enigmatic and very zenish smile. Of course the Harbingers mostly communicated telepathically, and there was even debate as to whether they had mouths. I guess you could point to the wartish seam midway up the trunk that constantly oozed some kind of thick sap and call that a mouth.

  Evolution. Capital E.

  It had become a movement. Aimee even had one of the ubiquitous “E” T-shirts, not the Ralph Lauren version, though.

  “Seriously,” she said, laying her arm across my shoulders. “There’re stories like that almost every day. You can’t deny it.”

  “Look, I’m just a humble businessman in a business that’s gotten too humble.”

  “Burt—”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, never mind.”

  The C.H. finished his latte, folded his Wall Street Journal neatly and replaced it in his briefcase.

  “The stories are all bunk,” he said, smartly snapping chrome latches and standing up. He was a little flushed around the hairline. “And if you ask me there aren’t any aliens, either. It’s just some kind of—”

  “Some kind of . . . ?” Aimee said.

  “Mass hallucination, whatever.”

  It was true that some people claimed they were unable to quite . . . see . . . the aliens. Most notably the senior senator from Ohio. Who could forget his famous “smoke and mirrors” press conference? And everybody commented on the soap bubble quality of their ships.

  “In my opinion,” the C.H. said, “Everybody has to get back to normal before it’s too late.”

  And then he went out among the twittered, and it was almost an hour before the next customer wandered in.

  *

  “People are scared,” I said at the other end of the day, standing in boxers by the window of my apartment, only a couple of blocks from my rapidly drowning venture.

  “Some people are,” Aimee said. “Are you?”

  “It wouldn’t be manly to admit it,” I said. “Besides, I’m not really.”

  She moved—a silky whisper of girlflesh and sheets. She didn’t say anything, and I felt compelled to fill in the gap. Somehow Aimee and I had lost the comfort of easy silences.

  “The fear thing, that’s just my pet theory. Remember at first there was an uptick in business? People wanted to talk, gather, bond.”

  “Have a cup a joe,” Aimee said.

  “Right. But now they’re, I don’t know, hunkered down. You can only take so much weirdness before you have to shut it off.”

  “Not everyone has to shut it off,” Aimee said. “Maybe some of those hunkering people are busy.”

  I turned from the window. Aimee was looking at the ceiling, fingers laced behind her head, the sheet about her waist and her breasts so lovely.

  “Busy doing what?” I said.

  “Evolving.”

  I had to ask.

  *

  We weren’t married but we had anniversaries. One arrived in the midst of the consummate weirdness. That pervasive sense of unreality plus the fact that I was furiously dog-paddling in a sea of red ink had conspired to short-circuit my memory.

  “Happy anniversary,” Aimee said on the phone.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Sweet-talker.”

  “Aim, I’m really sorry.”

  “You can make it up to me.”

  “Anything.”

  “Come over now.”

  She had borrowed a friend’s little Toyota pickup. Aimee’s apartment building, which was old and consisted of only twelve units, provided each tenant with his or her own mini-garage so narrow and shallow they were really car boxes with barely enough room to open the driver’s door. Which didn’t matter to Aimee, since she didn’t own a vehicle and used her car box for storage.

  The door was up and the interior space had been cleaned out. Presumably to make room for the thing in the back of the yellow Toyota.

  A block of white marble. That pickup was riding so low on its springs that it was a wonder the rear wheels could turn.

  “Isn’t it beautiful!” Aimee said.

  “Very pretty. Paper-weight?”

  “I’m going to sculpt it, silly.” She was beaming.

  “Cool.”

  “Your skepticism does not affect me.”

  “I’m not being skeptical. But don’t you think it might be easier to start with something less intimidating, not to mention cheaper, like clay?”

  “I am not in the least bit intimidated. And I got a great deal at The Quarry Werks. Kind of an installment plan. They didn’t seem to care. Everybody’s so spaced out.”

  The block was three feet on a side and weighed approximately twenty-seven million pounds. A couple of guys from Aimee’s building helped us muscle it around. Transferring the thing from the Toyota’s tailgate (dangerous skreek of hinges) to the mover’s cart threatened to give us all hernias. Even pushing it into the garage was not easy. Once it started rolling, okay. But getting it started was murder. We three he-men bent at the knees, put our shoulders into it, and made like Sisyphean triplets.

  Aimee was like one of those dilettantes I imagine must inhabit old French novels. During our three-year relationship she had “been” a painter, a writer, a juggler, and a chef. Brief enthusiasms that burned bright then dimmed to forgotten clinkers. When I met her she was waiting tables for a living. We hit it off and I hired her to help me with Bean There. After that, one thing led to the inevitable other and we became much more than partners in caffeine. At thirty-two this was the longest relationship I’d ever managed.

  When the other guys left, I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and asked, “What put you onto sculpting, anyway?”

  “It’s funny,” Aimee said. “I had a dream about it and when I woke up I thought, Why not? But that isn’t the funny part. The funny part is that I hadn’t been asleep, I just thought I was.”

  She hugged me and kissed my mouth. “You’re my mighty man,” she said.

  “Mighty Man could use a cold beer.”

  “Come up to my lair, then.”

  I did, but not for beer.

  *

  News clippings taped to the wall of Aimee’s garage/sculptor’s studio:

  From the Associated Press, originally reported in the Memphis Herald Tribune, June 15, 2005. Tupelo Woman Teleports: Candace McCoy, a forty-six-year-old housewife from Tupelo paid an unusual visit to Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion yesterday when she unaccountably materialized in the “Jungle Room” before an eyewitness, security guard Joseph Lytel. Says Lytel, “The air got kind of dark and ripply, then she sort of stepped through.” Mrs. McCoy, who appeared in a state of shock and was transported to Mercy Hospital, kept saying, “I just love Elvis . . .”

  From Reuters, June 17, 2005. Astronaut Claims Moon Walk, Thirty Years Late: Former Apollo 13 Commander James Lovell today announced that he had at long last walked upon the surface of the moon. Lovell, 77, said he had not required any life-sustaining equipment and his mode of transport was “. . . nothing more
complicated than the simple desire to be there.” As evidence, Commander Lovell offered his bedroom slippers, the bottoms of which were caked with a gray talc-like powder. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Houston, Texas confirmed that the powder is indeed moon dust, though there is no official word on that conclusion. Lovell, appearing on the front lawn of his Palm Springs home in a white T-shirt with a large black letter “E” on the front, described his journey as an “Evolutionary” experience, apparently referring to the enigmatic statement of the Harbingers. “The view from Fra Mauro was transcendental,” said Lovell.

  From The Associated Press: Dead Man Singing. Jerry Garcia performed “live” for the first time since his death in 1994. Tom Petty, performing at Washington State’s Gorge amphitheater, announced a “special guest.” Garcia then ambled onto the stage wearing a tie-dyed “E” T-shirt and an acoustic guitar. There were cheers, but also some screams from those closest to the stage, and at least three concert goers fainted and required medical attention.

  *

  I was sleeping over at Aimee’s and woke up, terrified. It must have been a nightmare, I don’t know. The Madrona outside her bedroom window cast a pale shadow over the bed, and I thought of the Harbingers, the hideous physicality of them. It was two o’clock in the morning. Aim was not in the bed.

  I pulled on a pair of jeans and didn’t bother tying my shoes. The door of the garage was raised about a quarter way for air. Bright light spilled out. I ducked under the partially raised door. Hot halogen lamps on tripod stands illuminated the marble block. Aim’s face glowed with a sheen of sweat.

  “Burt!”

  “I had a bad dream, or something.”

  “Poor baby. Well I’ve had a breakthrough.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s the tools.”

  “What about them?”

  “I was using the wrong ones. Look at this.”

  She meant the block. I looked. To my eye it appeared pretty much the same as it had the day we off-loaded it from the pickup truck, though I could tell she had hacked at it a little. A few fragments of marble lay scattered around the stool, and the face of the block had been scarred in a minor way.